It was the middle of the night, for us, when we heard the news: Blue Protocol is dead. It will never be receiving a localized release, and while the Japanese version will stay online for a few more months, it’s just a gesture. The game is dead. And the thing is that we all knew that was the likely outcome. After Bandai Namco Online declared insolvency, the writing was on the wall. We knew this game was never coming out here.
But when did it happen? What led to this happening? Captivated by the same spirit of simultaneous obsession and curiosity that so often informs my actions, I became fixated on this singular question. Blue Protocol may be dead, and the question of what led to it dying is honestly pretty mundane: It never attracted a high enough player count in Japan to justify its operating costs. But with those questions being incredibly easy to answer, my mind latched on to the question of when the game died – because it was not actually in the middle of the night. The game died long before that.
First of all, let’s look at an obvious point of data: the declaration of insolvency. At a glance, that provides us with a pretty good date. As of that particular moment, it was likely that the lights were going to turn off for a number of projects while the company’s ultimate fate was up in the air, and surely by that point Bandai Namco (henceforth referred to as “Bamco” to save myself some typing) had a pretty clear picture of where things were going. It makes it somewhat ironic that just a week before the developer was running an anniversary event and talking about reducing prices, perhaps a last-ditch effort to show some upward movement.
But wait. It was back in May of this year when we first noted that Amazon conspicuously left Blue Protocol off of its upcoming release slate. This does track decently well with the idea that Bamco saw some writing on the wall ahead of the first anniversary. And it’s not exactly a shock that communication with eager western players had kind of dried up after the game’s Japanese launch didn’t explode with popularity.
In fact, you actually have to go back a fair bit to see Amazon really talking about Blue Protocol past the initial media blitz. The last major development there was in November of 2023, when a technical test was held for the game ahead of what was at the time supposed to be an early 2024 release. Obviously that did not happen in early 2024; in fact, after that testing happened, Amazon went conspicuously silent, even though Bamco was still talking about the game and hosting events.
So what happened? Did Amazon see the writing on the wall at that point? We know from the shutdown announcement that Amazon didn’t lay anyone off over the removal of the game from its catalogue, but why would it not say that until now? Why would it be that in May, Amazon already knew it wouldn’t be publishing the game when the shutdown didn’t come until August? Something is going on there. Something is afoot.
The only answer at that point was to do the thing that any sane person would do: start combing through Reddit.
There, I found an anonymous person who confirmed leaks of files from Totally Legitimate internal documentation at Amazon, with full localization files in place for English, French, German, and Spanish versions of the game. Obviously, says this anonymous leaker, Amazon had plans to release this game right up until the end of service was announced, which took even it by surprise! And why was Amazon being so quiet about it? Why, that’s obvious too: It wanted to make sure that the focus was on New World and Throne & Liberty, which both have major releases planned this year! By waiting until Blue Protocol had advanced further, Amazon could unveil the game in its full and updated form to a waiting audience with all the development advanced. Better still, Tencent is going to buy out the game now that it’s reaching end of service, allowing Bamco to write off the investment, then further turn around and release a global version of the game for everyone! You can’t see the leaked files, but it all makes sense! After all, why would developers announce something that never happened? It’s clearly all just a lengthy run-around! Blue Protocol isn’t dead at all! It’s just in a bit of a gully at the moment, and once it re-releases we’re all going to love it and it’ll bring food and water and smite our enemies!
Because, you know… that’s much more plausible than someone on Reddit just lying about a game that died in June of 2023 when it launched.
Yes, I was leading you on with the nutty social media conspiracy theory there. Here’s the actual answer. Blue Protocol launched to tepid sales in Japan and struggled to even retain its launch audience. Bamco was legally obligated to block people from outside of Japan trying to connect, and that didn’t help audience retention. By the time localization work had begun, it was almost certainly already too late for a company already struggling with revenues and cash flow.
So when did Blue Protocol die? The actual answer is that there is no actual answer and it doesn’t matter. In a year’s time, nobody is going to care. The game looked gorgeous, but based on the information we have from people who actually played it, it wasn’t really very good as launched. Gorgeous graphics do not a satisfying MMORPG make, and based on the game’s business model and its struggle to retain an audience, we can be pretty confident that there was no reworking that was going to make it into a mega hit in the west either.
Amazon didn’t go quiet because of some conspiracy; it went quiet because it had legal obligations about publishing options and it didn’t want to sour its relationship, but neither Amazon nor Bamco thought a Western release was going to save the game or even be worth the time and effort. As entertaining as skullduggery might be, the actual answers are… wholly dull and entirely comprehensible.
The worst part is that even if I could find the exact date when it died, would it matter? The dead will still be dead. It’s another gorgeous-looking game that you and I won’t get to play. Maybe it was great, maybe it was terrible, but it’s still just as dead. Answers will not change it. It might be momentarily satisfying, but so what?
I started looking back because I was curious. I wanted to see if I could pinpoint when things went wrong, and I realized it didn’t matter. So I stopped because it turns out that answering the when matters less than the what. It’s another disappointment, another thing lost, and no amount of answering will make the wound lesser. As with every game that sunsets, all that happens is that you lose and then you just… stare. You stare at an empty space where there once was something, there now is nothing, and no answers will ever deliver what you dearly want.
You cannot get the answer that makes it not hurt. You can arrange the notes, check the dates, pull lines of string between them, and even as you see the shape you will be whispering the same words to no effect.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
